God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (8 page)

We were wrestling. Before my injury, I had been the best pankrationist – and the best boxer. The effective loss of my left hand, which was just strong enough to grasp the reins and not much more, left me a much worse wrestler and a bad pankrationist. I didn’t do much to change that.

It must have been spring in the year that Alexander became regent. Greece was in ferment, Demosthenes was ranting against us every day in the Athenian Assembly, the Thebans were threatening war and nothing was as it had been in the outside world, or in the Gardens of Midas.

The pecking order among the pages was no longer malleable. Hephaestion was at the top, with Alexander – he had no authority of his own, but Alexander would always back him, and the rest of us had learned to avoid open conflict. On the other hand, while I had been on my father’s estates, my ribs knitting back together, my arms healing, Hephaestion had changed for the worse – he no longer stood up for the other pages against Alexander. I suspect they’d been lovers since they knew how to do it, but they were thicker than thieves after the hunting camp. Inseparable.

I was a distant third. I was not handsome, and that counted against me with Alexander. But like Black Cleitus, whose loyalty was beyond question, I had special rank, and no other page could touch me.

After us came the best of the other boys – Perdiccus, Amyntas, Philip the Red – by now all leaders in their own right, with their own troops of cavalry. Cassander, Antipater’s son, was there – a useless twit then and now – and Marsysas, who even as a young man played the lyre and wrote better poetry than we did; nor was his sword hand light. Indeed, even Cassander – the best of the worst, if you like – was a fair fighter, the sort of man that troopers could follow in a pinch, with a rough sense of humour and a good way with hunting dogs.

Then there was a pack of younger men and boys – the youngest was ten or eleven, and we treated them like slaves, for the most part, while trying to win their devotion at the same time, as older boys do to younger the world over. It was good practice for leadership – for war. Everything we did was practice for war.

At any rate, we were fighting unarmed in the palaestra – a cool spring morning, all of us oiled, naked and trying to pretend we weren’t cold.

I went up against Amyntas. I never tried – oh, Zeus, it hurts more to tell this than to tell of being tortured. I never even tried. I basically lay down and let him pin me.

No one said a thing. Because by then, I’d done it fifty times. In fact, I remember Alexander smiling at me.

But after we’d had a bite of bread moistened in wine, while Alexander and Hephaestion were fighting like desperate men – and by then we had seventeen-year-old bodies and a lot of muscle – Aristotle came and put a hand on my shoulder.

‘What I hate most about the Illyrians,’ he said, ‘was that they tortured your arete out of your body, and now you have no daimon at all.’

Sometimes you know a thing is true. I burst into tears.

Every man there turned and looked at me, and the pity in their eyes was like Tarxes’ eating spike driven into me again and again.

Aristotle took me by the hand and led me out into the garden.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said, and he put a hand on the back of my neck as if I might bolt, ‘you were the best of the pages. And now you are not even a man. You have the honour of the prince’s esteem – you saved him. You alone saved him – with your head and with your sword. Is that to be the sum of your acts? Will you lie on that bed of laurels until it is withered, or will you rise from it?’ He turned me to face him. He was not a particularly handsome man, but I’ve always maintained that his looks made men think of him as
the
philosopher – bushy eyebrows, deep-set, wide, clear eyes, a thin mouth, a high forehead – the very image of manly wisdom.

I’m ashamed to say that all I could manage was some sobs. It was all true. I’d lain down for every contest since I came back, and no one said me nay. I was an object of
pity.

‘Let me tell you what I know of men,’ Aristotle said. ‘Most men are capable of greatness once. They rise above themselves, or they follow a greater man, or the gods lend a hand, or the fates – once, a man may make a fortune, may tell the truth despite pressure to lie, may have a worthy love who leads him to do good things. This taste of arete is all most men ever have – and they are better for it.’ He looked at me. ‘Stop blubbering, son of Lagus. I tell you – and I know – you are better than that. I expect better of you. Go and fight and lose. Lose fifty times to lesser men and you will be better for it. You have reached a point where there is no penalty for failure, and that is the worst thing that can happen to a young man. So here is your penalty – my contempt. And here is your reward – my admiration. Which will you have, son of Lagus?’

I’d like to say that I stood straighter, looked him in the eye and thanked him. What I did was to run off into the garden and bawl my eyes out.

And the next day, when we were to box, I faced off against a much younger page – and folded.

Aristotle just shook his head.

And over the next few days, I began to notice a certain want of regard among the younger pages. They had worshipped me when I returned, and that worship was falling off.

That hurt.

Cleomenes, the young sprig I’d rescued in the hunting camp, was my most loyal follower, and he sat on my tightly rolled war cloak in the barracks and glared at me. He had a black eye.

He wasn’t eleven any more, either.

‘Amyntas says you are a coward,’ he said with all the hot accusation that a thirteen-year-old can throw at a seventeen-year-old. ‘He says that the Illyrians cut your courage out, and we should treat you like a woman.’

‘If Amyntas thinks women are cowards, he should try birthing a baby,’ I said. One of my mother’s sayings. I sighed. ‘I’m not a coward,’ I said.

‘Prove it,’ Cleomenes said. ‘Beat the shit out of Amyntas.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because that’s what he did to me,’ Cleomenes said with a half-sob.

Life among the pages. Very nice.

It occurred to me to go to Alexander.

But after further thought, I realised that they were all right.

It is odd – I don’t think I was ever a coward. I just didn’t need to excel, and since the need was taken away, I coasted. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. I certainly had a great many nightmares, and my camp girl – I’ll explain that later – would wake me in the night with a hand on my cheek because I was screaming and waking the barracks.

I thought about it, and I came to a set of decisions – every one of them nested into the next. I needed to learn to be the man I had been. And I wasn’t going to learn with the pages.

Polystratus had become a foot companion – one of the elite infantrymen of the old king – and he had a farm not far from the gardens. So I asked for an hour’s leave and rode out to find him, and dragged him from his plough and made of him my sparring partner. His whole idea of fighting with a sword was to hit faster and harder – worthy objectives in themselves, but not a way to win a fight, unless your only goal is to smash your way through the other man’s shield. So, in order to arrange to practise myself, I spent two weeks training him.

Two weeks in which I must have interfered with his ploughing and his sowing, too. I all but lived in his hovel, and his wife – another freed slave – feared me. But teaching Polystratus to be a swordsman did more for my own fighting skills than anything I’d learned in the last year. In fact, I think it was those two weeks that put me on the path I’m still on. Somewhere in the teaching of Polystratus I realised – that there was a theory, a philosophy, to combat. That each motion of an attack, a defence, could be analysed like a problem of philosophy.

I was not the first Hellene to understand this. I may not have been the first seventeen-year-old to understand this. But it was like a key to unlock a trunk full of knowledge. Many, many things that I had learned by rote – steps, hip movements, overhand cuts, thrusts – came together in two weeks to form a sort of Thalian singularity, and if you don’t know who Thales was, young man, you will have to ask your tutor and report to me tomorrow.

I admit, it was easier with my former slave – easier to risk a contest against him, and unimportant to lose. Why? Because he was a man of no consequence, that’s why. What did I care if a former slave could best me?

Except that in those two weeks, Polystratus became a
man
to me. Since that time, I have seen this happen again and again – worthy men develop a kinship with their opponents, just as unworthy men come to loathe them. The worthiness resides in the competitor – if he brings with him an ability to emulate and admire his enemy, then he is a better man for it. Or so I think.

At any rate, after a fortnight of daily struggle in the mud of spring, Polystratus was a passable pankrationist, and probably the best swordsman in the foot companions – not that they ever fought with swords. But still.

All this time, every morning that I was paired with another man in a contest, I lay down – if not literally, then in effect.

Aristotle shook his head, and then, after another week, didn’t even bother with that.

But Alexander began to look at me curiously.

Cleomenes ceased to come and sit with me, or to flirt with my bed-warmer. I should put in here that Philip had become deeply concerned by Alexander’s little ways – with sex. It was known to every one of us that Philip thought that his son was soft – possibly effeminate. A gynnis. There had been loud words exchanged on the subject, and Olympias – never a subtle woman – sent Alexander a hetaera, a courtesan, named Calixeinna.

She was outrageously beautiful, with the sort of body – high, perfectly round breasts, a tiny waist, a long, sculpted face with small, thick lips for kissing and enormous eyes – the sort of body that drives men mad.

All of us – even the prince – lived in the Macedonian version of a Spartan barracks, in messes of ten boys – five oldsters and five youngsters. Some oldsters slept alone, some with each other, some with the younger boys. Some were just sharing cloaks for warmth. Eh? And some weren’t. Until Calixeinna came.

The poor thing was appalled to be the only woman in what must have seemed like an armed camp with academics. She was quite intelligent – she could recite great swathes of the
Iliad
– but the idea that she had no room of her own, that she had to dress and undress with forty boys, made her angry. She threatened to leave.

Alexander refused to live outside the barracks.

Aristotle bit his lips, cursed and found women for us all, or, if not all, at least a few per mess. Country girls – not prostitutes, no one’s father would have allowed that. The king offered them all dowries and regular pay, and I suspect there was no shortage of volunteers – we were good-looking, clean and noble.

Of course, this was also the occasion for his famous lecture on the life of hedonism versus the life of restraint and self-control, too.

The truth is that our barracks life improved immeasurably when the women moved in. The clothes were cleaner, the conversation was better, and the youngsters began to laugh and play – the women wouldn’t allow them to be abused. Women exert a subtle influence – not so subtle, sometimes. They will say things without fear that even a warrior might fear to say.

At any rate, I had a regular bed-warmer from the first. She was named Iphegenia – some parents need a better classical education – and she was pretty enough, with large hips and smooth muscles and breasts. She was scared the first time we were naked together, and after that, not – and she was never put off by my scars. I can’t say I loved her – she was the most selfish woman I’ve ever known well – but she took good care of me, bore my first bastard and my pater put her on a farm for me. I hope she lives yet.

Oh, I’m an old man. I love to think of Genny stripping for bed – the only sign I ever had that she was as eager as I was the way she’d incline towards my sleeping roll like a hunting dog pointing to the prey. Hah!

But Alexander appeared to want nothing to do with his courtesan. She was in his sleeping roll most nights, and a few times I saw her under his cloak, once even wrapped in his arms. He was gracious to her. But that was the limit, and Aristotle openly admonished him against her.

Olympias sent notes explaining how men and women had sex, and how much better sex with a woman was than sex with a man. Just picture getting this lecture from your mother, herself a famous beauty, a veritable avatar of Aphrodite. Zeus, god of kings, what a horror that woman could be, and how much of Alexander can be laid at her door. Sober, she was brilliant and scary, and drunk, she was a lascivious predator with no scruples and a poisonous memory. And her power to manipulate – she was quite brilliant . . .

She was very beautiful, with sparkling eyes and curly brown hair, tall, elegantly limbed – please don’t imagine her as somebody’s mother. She bore Alexander at the age of fourteen, and when I first met her – not first saw her at court at a distance, but actually stood in her presence – she was twenty-five years old, in the prime of her beauty. Her skin glowed, and she herself had a sort of radiant vitality that she passed unmarred to her son. I’ve known men who hated her, and I’ve heard magnificent tales of her debauchery, and I know some of them to be true, but let it be said – Macedonian men disliked powerful women, and she was a powerful woman who added to beauty and charm an indomitable will and an almost unbreakable bond with the king that allowed her to call the tune at court. She had many enemies.

She was fiercely protective of Alexander and her protection extended to his friends and companions, and despite having several skirmishes with her myself, as you will hear, I have to admit that she was often our ally against Philip and his companions – the older men who saw us first as children and later as dangerous rivals.

But I digress. That winter, she had got it into her head that Alexander needed a woman, and she decided that the woman of his dreams would also be a useful tool to manipulate him – this is a fine example of how her mind worked.